Customer experience is perhaps the greatest source of competitive advantage available to your company. According to Forrester, companies with superior customer experience grow revenue more than three times faster than companies with inferior customer experience. Greater customer loyalty also abounds, as these satisfied customers will stay with you longer, spend more with you, and recommend you to others.
Sounds great, right? The question that now arises is: Who owns the customer experience? Are sales and marketing in charge? Perhaps, but the responsibility should extend throughout every facet of your business. Technology is an important component of providing an excellent customer experience by tying together all interactions and across different devices.
Now more than ever, the contact center plays the most critical role, as it determines how many of your customers view your business. Providing customers with an effortless, efficient, and omnichannel experience is key. Customer expectations of their contact center experiences are evolving, as customers are using web and mobile self-service more than all other channels—including voice, which is now reserved for more complex issues that still must be resolved quickly. They turn to voice as a last resort, because they couldn’t resolve their issue anywhere else.
Analysis of contact center interactions also allows you to fine-tune the customer experience, as voice of the customer (VOC) initiatives gather valuable customer feedback that lets you know whether your experience is hitting or missing the mark. These VOC initiatives also are invaluable in preparing for artificial intelligence (AI) within your organization, and the information can be incorporated into your overall strategy to help the customer.
Do your reporting and benchmarks look good? In addition to a customer satisfaction score, you may want to think of other metrics that will help you assess how well your organization is performing. You must continue to innovate to create high expectations, and consistently deliver that excellent customer experience. This means you must constantly evaluate your technology, people, and processes to make sure they remain best-in-class.
This begs another question: Are you taking advantage of new technologies and their ability to enhance the customer experience? If not, you’re losing out on an opportunity to gain ground against your competitors.
The smart machine era will be the most disruptive in the history of IT.
— Gartner
Furthermore, enterprises with plans to adopt a digital transformation strategy within the next year are shifting their focus toward its ability to enhance the customer experience. In order to make the most of these enhancements, contextually driven workflows, personalized experiences, and connected devices—which are part of the Internet of Things (IoT)—must also be integrated.
Therefore, integrating customer experience strategies with burgeoning technologies like mobile applications and IoT will be crucial.
A study from the John M. Olin School of Business at Washington University estimates that 40% of today’s Fortune 500 companies on the S&P 500 will no longer exist in 10 years.
The reason this is true is due to failure to execute on their strategy.
We recommend creating a business technology roadmap, keeping the customer experience in focus, and executing quickly to meet customer demands. You will then be able to dazzle customers with an effortless, comprehensive, and truly omnichannel experience, personalized to fit their needs.
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Topics: Customer Experience
